Back issues
I’ve been publishing Argentfork since 2004, the year the Sons of Tito Francona broke the curse of the Bambino. Since then, I’ve eaten pig’s head, Samish oysters and Castelvetrano olives, drunk No. 209 gin, Cahors wine and New Belgium Tripel—and written about all of them. Dig in.
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TASTES Jan 06The gastronomical moi
The Auvergne cowboys smiled beneath winter caps and heifers breathed icy snot. Steam seeped off the grassy dung piling up in the town square. It was deepest foreshadowing.
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LEGACY Oct 05The peanut farmer
In the near-spring of 1980, Barnett Asbury Poole dropped dead smelling, probably, of minnows and hair tonic. He fell like a great, big, acorn-rich oak from a random stick of lightning that you want to call bad luck or, sillier, fate.
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SUMMER FRUITS Jul 05Sorbets and other sorts
"Melon d’eau," said the North African gent who sold produce at our French market. His watermelons were fat and snake green. We selected one from the mass of globes. He lifted it with both hands and the bottom fell out, as if John Gotti had taken a ball bat to it.
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ORANGES Apr 05Oranges and strawberries
My father-in-law, John, took us to a secret stash of his … off Thonotossassa Road, about ten miles outside Ybor City. We parked the rental car and entered a worn-out looking yard, ragged with rotten limbs, mossy sand and fire-ant piles.
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BLUE CHEESE Jan 05Red, white and bleu
Blue cheese is not unlike a wild pony, romping and stomping its way across the mouth at meal’s end. Attempt to rope it in with the last of a merlot or pinot and it may bolt on you: Nothing scares a tender red wine more fully than a ripe blue cheese.
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AUTUMN Oct 04Fallen fruit
Much of the fruit lies rotting on the ground—it is a veritable Antietam of pear death, this ground, covered in mushy, black pear corpses. But so much more clings to the limbs of the tree, which hunches from the weight of such bearing.
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THE MARTINI Jul 04Let us now praise famous gin
Nothing self-promotes better than a Martini. All the Manhattans and Negronis and Americanos simply fade—I drink around them, nostalgic for liquors by other names, of other colors, but otherwise nonplussed. In the end, it’s gin.
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FIRST THINGS Apr 04Horchata, et cetera
Horchata always intimidated me, gurgling in its tank like roiling milk, until I learned it was dairy at all but steeped rice. Then I learned that nothing is better for calming the mouth after a fiery batch of tacos. In Spain, it isn't rice but chufa that makes horchata.
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BODY + BLOOD Jan 04Quelling the curiosities
Before I left my foodwriting job of one year for a sabbatical in the poorest part of France, I received a copy of their reprint of "The Curiosities of Food," Peter Lund Simmonds' magical account of the way the world ate when he exploring it in the mid-19th century.
